Voter registration is way up around the state

Nearly 15 million people are now registered to vote in Texas, a state record.

Texas currently has more than 14.8 million voters registered — over 1 million more than were registered in the 2012 presidential election, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office.

Keith Ingram, director of elections for the secretary of state, told the House Elections Committee on Wednesday that about 14.3 million voters were registered in time for the March primaries.

The increase could be attributed to higher voter interest in a presidential election year, as well as a growing Texas population, according to Alicia Pierce, spokeswoman for the Texas secretary of state.

There are still two weeks left before the registration deadline, so expect the final number to be higher, perhaps over 15 million. To put this into some context, here are the registration totals from previous years:

So to put this another way, the increase from 2012 to 2016 is almost as big – and in the end, may be at least as big – as the increase from 2000 to 2012. At 15 million registrations, if turnout of registered voters is the same as it was in 2012 (58.58%), total turnout would be nearly 8.8 million, or some 800,000 more than what we had in 2012. One possible reason for the polls being what they are is a belief that all of this will lead to a surge in Democratic numbers. For example, a result of 4.6 million for Trump, 3.9 million for Clinton, and 300,000 for the others would be an eight-point Trump win (52.3% to 44.3%), certainly in line with polling. We’re deep into speculation here, and of course the polling numbers may change, so don’t take any of this seriously. We’ll begin to get some idea when early voting begins. In the meantime, let’s just call this further evidence that this is a different election.